And now, Plato

[Cemendur]

Thank you Mike. Their truly are a multitude of ways we think of playing in roles.

I am in the process of studying Constanin Stanislavsky's Method Acting (The Method) and how it applies to role-playing games. Sorry no essay now, just a few thoughts.

For now, here are some quotes on this.

"I call sensibility that faculty of exaltation which agitates an actor, takes possession of his senses, shakes even his very soul, and enables him to enter into the worst tragic situations, and the most terrible of the passions as if they were his own. The intelligence, which accompanies sensibility, judges the impressions which the latter has made us feel: it selects, arranges them, and subjects them to calculation." 18th century by French actor Francois-Joseph Talma cited on the Lee Strasburg Theatre Institute website http://www.strasberg.com/defacting.html

"(Constanin or Konstanin) Stanislavsky's contribution. It is in this context that the enormous contribution in the early 20th century of the great Russian actor and theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky can be appreciated. Stanislavsky was not an aesthetician but was primarily concerned with the problem of developing a workable technique. He applied himself to the very problems of developing a workable technique. He applied himself to the very problems that Diderot and others had believed insoluble: the recapture and repetition of moments of spontaneity or inspiration, which could not be controlled and repeated at will even by many of the greatest actors. Stanislavsky dedicated himself to the central problem of how to stimulate the actor's creativity. Even early in his career, while watching performances by great actors, he had felt that all of them had something in common, something he encountered only in greatly talented actors. In his later work, as director of the Moscow Art Theatre, he often experienced those flashes of intuition or inspiration that stimulate the imagination and turn something that one understands with the mind into an emotional reality and experience. Stanislavsky described such a moment occurring at a low point in the rehearsals for Anton Chekhov's drama "Three Sisters", when the "the actors stopped in the middle of the play, ceased to act, seeing no sense in their work." Suddenly something incomprehensible happened: an accidental sound, of someone nervously scratching his fingernails on the bench on which he sat, reminded Stanislavsky of a scratching mouse, setting off an entire sequence of previously unconscious memories that put the work at hand into a new spiritual context." cited on the Lee Strasburg Theatre Institute website http://www.strasberg.com/defacting.html

"In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.", Konstanin Stanislavsky

"Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors." Konstanin Stanislavsky

"When I perform the play his spirit takes me over. I don't know if I am channeling him. But I am not acting Harold Clurman. Harold Clurman is acting me." Ronald Rand http://www.fasca.net/fascanet/actorsupdate/clip_actorsoul.html

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Here's some notes on Method actors.

"Marlon Brando Biography: An influential, eccentric stage and screen actor, Marlon Brando first made his name as an exponent of 'The Method', an acting style based on the teachings of Constantin Stanislavsky. Method acting rejected the traditional techniques of stagecraft in favor of an emotional expressiveness ideally suited to the angst-ridden atmosphere of postwar American society. Brando studied the Stanislavsky technique in the 1940s, first at the New School and later at the Actors Studio."
http://www.hollywood.com/celebs/bio/celeb/1678211

"Lee Strasberg: One of America's leading proponents of Method acting. Strasberg arrived in the USA at age nine, co-founded the influential, left-leaning Group Theater in 1930 and became artistic director of the newly formed Actors Studio in 1948. Strasberg and his associates, through their teaching of the Method at the Studio, heavily influenced the course of American screen acting; students included Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman and Shelley Winters. In 1969 he set up the Lee Strasberg Institute, with chapters in Los Angeles and New York. He himself acted in only a handful of films (his first and best part was as a workaday Jewish mobster in 1974's "The Godfather, Part II" for which he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination)."
http://www.hollywood.com/celebs/bio/celeb/1674685

Paul Newman discusses the Method: http://www.reel.com/reel.asp?node=features/interviews/newman/2

"Those who knew Corey's teaching process said he was a Stanislavsky Method teacher but with a small "m." His process was eclectic and involved one-on-one work with an actor. He created improvisational exercises that allowed actors to engage their imaginations and subconscious minds in pursuit of a theme that they could apply to their roles.

"Corey was always pursuing a current underlying emotional and psychological theme in the actor's work. And in doing that, he was trying to help the actor relate to the here and now rather than the arcane notion of the character's circumstances. His list of students makes up a who's who of the Hollywood elite since the 1950s and includes James Dean, Anthony Perkins, Shirley Knight, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Robert Blake, Leonard Nimoy, Robin Williams, Rob Reiner, Robert Towne, Roger Corman, Penny Marshall, Taylor Hackford and a young Jack Nicholson." http://theforbidden-zone.com/coreynews.shtml

Their seems to be an unclear division within Stanislavsky and his students. A division between what is described as the use of emotional memory projected into a character and what is described elsewhere as spiritual ecstacy, trance, possession, or any host of other spiritual terms. Corey seems to be an example of the emotional memory path, Strasberg while seems to be taking a more spiritual route.[/url][/u]

[Gordon C. Landis]

John,

So, if Arabella snubs Dr. Westbrook, and somehow this is a problem for me as a player (no reason it has to be, but we're supposing for the moment it is) - what do we do?  As long as you and I are able to maintain a dialogue about the issue - perhaps in OOC conversation, or perhaps simply by play continuing, you noticing the scrinchy look on my face, and play teasing out more details of this snubbing . . . as long as that's happening, no problem.

But if you go into "it's what Arabella would do, and how dare you react to it in a negative way"- we're screwed.  

Mike,

I've found "the character exists" without the caveat "only as an expression of the player" to be a bit more pernicious than you seem to think - and I'd say that's because you almost always have that caveat in place.  And my thought is not that folks who DON'T have the caveat in place have carefully thought through the issues and trully believe the character exists outside themselves - they just fall into a pattern of acting as if that were true, and thus are prone to certain problems and can't even comprehend some of the solutions that might help solve those problems.  

I'm a have your cake and eat it too guy here - I don't think you lose that wonderful, I-don't-know-where-it-came-from-but-WOW-is-that-COOL-and-so-SO-right stroke of inspiration when you acknowledge that there is not "really" a character outside of yourself.  I've seen players who thought they had to operate in this "as if the character were outside me" mode realize that not only don't they have to do that, but they lose NOTHING by abandoning it .  This may not be true of everyone, and I'm not saying it should be.  But I am agreeing with Ralph that the habitual assumption that one should operate as if the character were an outside entity, even though we know it's not, really, certainly NEED not be core to roleplaying, and has some negative consequences when adopted uncritically.  And adopting it uncritically (which is obviously not what you, or John, or ChristopherK are doing), is, I think, very, very common.

Gordon

[John Kim]

But I am agreeing with Ralph that the habitual assumption that one should operate as if the character were an outside entity, even though we know it's not, really, certainly NEED not be core to roleplaying, and has some negative consequences when adopted uncritically.  And adopting it uncritically (which is obviously not what you, or John, or ChristopherK are doing), is, I think, very, very common.

I'd go along with that.  Really, there is very little critical understanding of roleplaying in general -- which is why it is great to have a forum like this where these questions can really be discussed.  Personally, I have encountered uncritical people on either side of this split.  That is, there are also people who habitually operate as if the character does not exist, and they do not realize the negative consequences of that approach.  It may be that the other kind are more common.  I don't claim to know what most gamers are like, so I couldn't say.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

One of the most annoying things about being a comedian is people asking you where you get your jokes.

One of the annoying things about being a musician is people asking you where do you get your song ideas from.

Creativity seems to be some kind of mystery to the general public.

Where do you get your ideas?

There is no mystery, really. I get my ideas from living my life. It's just that simple. It's just that complex.

What I have noticed about creativity and how it works is you notice something you think "what if.." and this builds.

This is the Psychodrama as described in DeProfundis BTW. Look at all the digging. They say it's for a new highway. No, they're looking for something.

Creativity is the ability to squish several thoughts together and make something new out of them. It seems to require a quickness of thought. Often I find improvised jokes fall flat because I had gone six degrees of separation for one spoken line to the second spoken line in my head making the two lines non-sequiter and not very funny.

So this is where the character comes from. Is this special? Hell, yeah. I just want to demystify it without losing the magic.

[pete_darby]

OKay, I'm playing catch up again...

For starters, I've always preferred Johnstone to Stanislavsky, if only becuase so many theatre teachers turn the method into "How many children had Lady MacBeth?" Contrariwise, teachers using Spolin seemed tied into the thirty games: I'm guessing that, once again, it's more bad teachers than bad technique.

Curse you, ChristopherK, for recommending another book on improv for me to read!

But to highlight one major difference between impro(v) and rpg's: Johnstone & Spolin both operate on the assumption that everyone involved in an improvisation is focussed on producing the best improvisation, regardless of the effects on each character, or a long term story beyond the individual session (though Johnstone has more to say than Spolin on developing interesting stories).

There's generally a license given in an improv session that anything up to but not including physical harm may be permitted; the guardian at the gates of the mind is given the night off.

I submit that this is not the case in the vast majority of rpg sessions: there are other agendas at work beyond completely free form improvisation, constraints including, but not limited to, the mechanical restraints of game systems, the generic constraints of the setting, and, probably most importantly, the social constraints of the social contract.

Furthermore, playing exclusively to the strongest motivations of the characters without "editing" the responses tends, in play, to have characters behaving like little bundles of id, focussed on their own agendas entirely without consideration of other characters. Not that isn't fun (it's the basis for Paranoia, amongst other games), but I worry about priveliging it without more co-operative modes being considered.

The question of whether a character is an independent entity, a place holder for the subconcious desires of the player, or an inbetween combination is an impossible one, as any answer is patently true for some characters, true for some players, false for others, and the answers can change within a session. It's also irrelevant, as it doesn't tell us anything about how or why people play, nor how to improve play for even a small fraction of players.

Getting to the "problem solving" aspect of this: If Arabella snubs Dr Westbrook "because that's what Arabella would do," the player has priveliged the prompting of the character model of Arabella over other concerns. What "that's what Arabella would do" tells us about play is, frankly, nothing. For a sim player, it may be a simple as that, within the simulation, any other reaction would break the illusion of reality. For a gamist player, "that's what Arabella would do" may be a euphemism for "it's the optimal course of action strategically." For a narrativist, it may be that the snubbing exemplifies the characters' theme. Without knowing why "Arabella would do that," we can't address a possible solution to the frustration of Dr Westbrook's player.

That being said, my advice to the good doctors player is suck it in and roll with the punches. Games, like life, are more fun that way.

Oh and the question of where do I get my ideas from? Irellevant. It's what I do with them that counts.

[Gordon C. Landis]

I wanted to post a public "thanks" to ChristopherK for this thread - among other things, it was for me a reminder that what *matters* is the act of play and creation of cool characters and stories.

John, I'm not going to claim anything about what's more common among gamers in general - when I say "very, very common" I can only refer to what I've seen personally and read about.  And you're certainly right about the two-way street - perhaps an unintended, extreme "Avatarism" (as ranted about by Ian Millington) is the outcome of an uncritical assumption that the character is nothing more than scrawls on a sheet of paper?

Everyone, thanks for some great posts, and I can't think of much else to say on the subject right now . . . but I'm sure that will pass :)

Gordon